While rival supermarket retailer Tesco has been selling a wide range of products online for three years, Sainsbury's has been slow to get more of its product range online. I've been looking at the new range on the website...

A move by Tesco may provide some hints about the state of affiliate marketing and its future.

Earlier this month, Tesco sent the 150 developers who have been working with Tesco.com's Grocery API an email detailing that the company was opening up its database to them and giving them the ability to build applications that could potentially generate lifelong affiliate commissions.

B&Q recently launched a standalone next-day delivery service which is designed to compete with retailers such as Screwfix. Problem is, it has also introduced a kind of into / portal page for visitors to choose which B&Q site they want to use.

Click on B&Q's homepage from a search engine, or head straight to diy.com and this is what you will see, and visitors now need to choose from the three options before they can start shopping:

Online retailers can do a lot more to help sell their products online, by using better product descriptions to convince customers to buy, and providing better quality product photos, especially in the case of more expensive items.

A post by Katie Lee on the Telegraph blog yesterday asks the question: 'Why is shopping online still so terrible?', and based on the headline, I was prepared to defend e-tailers, as there are some excellent e-commerce sites around, and most have improved over the last year or so.

While the title may be a bit of a generalisation, there are some good points about the quality of sales copy on product pages, and the poor quality of product photos. I've been having a look at some examples where retailers could do a lot more to sell expensive items...

The number of searches for store opening times and related terms spiked over the Easter weekend, as people looked to see if it was worth a trip to the local supermarket, but retailers aren't making the most of these searches.

Robin Goad from Hitwise has been looking at the number of searches for these terms, finding that Tesco, Asda and Sainsburys all featured in the top ten.